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Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

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Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#161

Post by gfodor »

kanetw wrote: post #158
gfodor wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting - I guess I assumed the hurdle is both hardware and software. Oculus's hand tracking was a huge lift. Is there any commercially available software stack being worked on that is at least hardware generic? Or is everyone forced to build from scratch?

There's a lot of research papers that I found, but nothing hardware generic unfortunately. Hand tracking is a difficult beast especially, and we would like to just use the new Ultraleap module for that, but they don't support Linux yet. Eye tracking is relatively simple because it's a closed/controlled environment. Just some IR LEDs, an IR camera, and some edge detection and math. SLAM (positional tracking) has a lot…

Cool, that's helpful, thanks!

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#163

Post by georgewsinger »

moron4hire wrote: post #136

Their approach of having a desktop metaphor within the VR environment is one that I have argued for a long time is the "right" approach to eventually grow VR as a general purpose compute platform. The only two other examples of this going right now are Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality platform with Windows Holographic and the Magic Leap One's interface. Windows MR works really well, Magic Leap is extremely half-bake…

Great points.

- (A) is tractable, and will be placed on our queue.

- RE (B): Simula has developed a special text filter to help improve its text quality. See https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula#text-quality for a demonstration. As you point out though, there are even deeper things that can be done. We have considered making a vector-based based terminal before (in which text is rendered on a vector basis).

- (D) is a point brought up by Forrest Reiling in his master's thesis on window managers (which influenced Simula's early founding). See [Toward General Purpose 3D User Interfaces: Extending Windowing Systems to Three Dimensions](https://github.com/evil0sheep/MastersThesis/blob/master/thes...).

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#164

Post by notjustanymike »

georgewsinger wrote: post #133

One of the founders of Simula here. We're flattered that someone posted us to HN, but we were honestly not ready for this much publicity at this precise stage of our project. It would have been better had this happened a few weeks from now, when we have more accurate footage of our actual prototype to show. Let me explain: 1. *Video footage.* The video footage on the front page of www.simulavr.com is taken against an…

> They won't supply us with parts unless we have some sort of product interest, but we can't generate any sort of product interest unless we have some sort of website. It's very much a chicken and egg sort of problem.

Well I reckon that problem is now solved.

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#165

Post by nynx »

georgewsinger wrote: post #133

One of the founders of Simula here. We're flattered that someone posted us to HN, but we were honestly not ready for this much publicity at this precise stage of our project. It would have been better had this happened a few weeks from now, when we have more accurate footage of our actual prototype to show. Let me explain: 1. *Video footage.* The video footage on the front page of www.simulavr.com is taken against an…

How good is the battery life for the prototype headsets? If the headset is small enough and lasts long enough, I could totally see myself tossing it in my backpack instead of a laptop.

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#166

Post by usrusr »

vyrotek wrote: post #134
swalsh wrote: post #26

The killer "corporate" app for VR in my opinion would be some kind of teleconference app. I absolutely HATE trying to have interactive brainstorming/collaborative design meeting remotely. There are various pancake tools, but none really compare to the experience of 2 people standing in front of a white board, and making wild motions with their arms that seemingly both people understand while drawing on a board. Some…

I absolutely agree. I'm very much a whiteboard hand-wavier guy. I explain with gestures as much as I do with the actual drawing (might be an Italian thing too). That said, this "pancake" problem reminded me of the old Wii head-tracking project.[1] There might be an interesting hybrid opportunity with that idea and 3d avatars. I feel like the head-tracking hack never really took off because it only worked as a solo ex…

I'd expect conventional live footage of whiteboard hand-waving to wildly outdo VR for the entire foreseeable future. If you need two guys hand-waving in different rooms, focus the extra tech on the whiteboards, to somehow merge their content.

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#167

Post by georgewsinger »

cs702 wrote: post #143
georgewsinger wrote: post #133

One of the founders of Simula here. We're flattered that someone posted us to HN, but we were honestly not ready for this much publicity at this precise stage of our project. It would have been better had this happened a few weeks from now, when we have more accurate footage of our actual prototype to show. Let me explain: 1. *Video footage.* The video footage on the front page of www.simulavr.com is taken against an…

Thank you for the clarification. Let me ask you a quick question that is surely on the minds of many other HNers: Are you guys using the prototypes for day-to-day work (i.e., are you dogfooding Simula hardware and software)?

Yes. We're building the Simula One because we ourselves wanted to work all day in VR, using the best OS (Linux). Here's a fun video I made working on Simula, in Simula: https://youtu.be/FWLuwG91HnI

And I love seeing the progress unfold on our own headset, because I can't wait to start working in it.

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#168

Post by georgewsinger »

georgewsinger wrote: post #167
cs702 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the clarification. Let me ask you a quick question that is surely on the minds of many other HNers: Are you guys using the prototypes for day-to-day work (i.e., are you dogfooding Simula hardware and software)?

Yes. We're building the Simula One because we ourselves wanted to work all day in VR, using the best OS (Linux). Here's a fun video I made working on Simula, in Simula: https://youtu.be/FWLuwG91HnI And I love seeing the progress unfold on our own headset, because I can't wait to start working in it.

I should also say that when you work a lot in VR, you get intimately familiar with its improvement bottlenecks:

1. *Text quality.* Text quality is really important, especially to sustain long work sessions. This is why we're pushing as hard as we can on resolution. It's more important for work than it even is for gaming, because gaming doesn't require you to sustain focus on detailed text for long periods of time.

2. *Headset bulkiness/portability.* Headsets are too bulky, and tethered ones are annoying to work with. While the Simula One won't be as light weight as headsets will become 10 years from now, it will at least be truly portable (not requiring you to tether to a PC with chords or over WiFi). We are also planning on using something like a halo strap to make flipping the headset up and down more easy (instead of requiring you to take the headset fully off or on).

3. *Real world stuff.* VR forces you to be very touch-type proficient. But sometimes you want to be able to see your keyboard, or see your surroundings, etc. We are planning on having an "AR mode" for our headset to help accommodate for this.

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#169

Post by roganartu »

Y_Y wrote: post #88
fouric wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's written in Haskell, it's highly likely that it'll be far harder to modify than something written in, well, not-Haskell. Haskell might be easy when you get the hang of it, but the vast majority of programmers haven't, and the language ideas are alien compared to the mainstream ones (Python, JS, C++, Lua). The design of Haskell also encourages users to be very clever, which only makes code harder to read.

I don't think writing Haskell ever gets easy, at least it hasn't for me over about ten years. Writing good code in any language is hard, but Haskell makes it harder to write bad code. I have to write object-oriented bullshit all day for my job, if I started a fun new project like this I'd happily choose Haskell. If people who only know JS and won't learn anything new can't contribute then that's a cost worth bearing.

> If people who only know JS and won't learn anything new can't contribute then that's a cost worth bearing.

I think this is an unfair and unnecessarily-snarky take.

My list of languages is fairly long these days. I’ve written php, ruby, and go in reasonable volume for mostly personal projects. I used to teach embedded C at uni. I write python professionally every day. Recently I’ve even started playing with rust (and had some success thanks to the awesome book). The list is far longer, these are just the ones used the most. I’ve been writing code in some capacity for the last 20 or so years (first self-taught, then at university, and more recently professionally full-time).

Despite all that, and not for lack of trying, for whatever reason purely functional languages are the only ones that elude me. Every couple of years I try Haskell or erlang again and I just get nowhere fast.

Maybe it’s because I was never very good at maths, maybe it’s because I haven’t had sufficient motivation, or maybe I just haven’t found the right monad blog post to convert me. All I know is Haskell remains chronically out of reach to many experienced and inexperienced devs alike.

Re: Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux

#170

Post by cs702 »

georgewsinger wrote: post #167
cs702 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the clarification. Let me ask you a quick question that is surely on the minds of many other HNers: Are you guys using the prototypes for day-to-day work (i.e., are you dogfooding Simula hardware and software)?

Yes. We're building the Simula One because we ourselves wanted to work all day in VR, using the best OS (Linux). Here's a fun video I made working on Simula, in Simula: https://youtu.be/FWLuwG91HnI And I love seeing the progress unfold on our own headset, because I can't wait to start working in it.

Awesome. That means more than any tech specs to me.

Wait a sec, are you on HN via Simula right now?

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